This Time it's Primal

Id
In my rock ‘n roll teacher days I always dedicated one class to the Doors' Oedipal epic, The End… The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots onHe took a face from the ancient galleryAnd he walked on down the hallHe went into the room where his sister lived, and...then hePaid a visit to his brother, and then heHe walked on down the hall, andAnd he came to a door...and he looked insideFather?
Yes son…
I want to kill youMother...I want to…OOOOO-AHHHH-OOOO-you*
That’s just the kind of teaching that the Texas State Board of Education would love to put an end to…the kind that supposedly does not reaffirm and reconvey our values from one generation to another, but disrupts the value system and introduces corruption and chaos into young minds. I must admit that each time I taught that class I got the distinct impression that my students were confronting corruption and chaos for the first time…at least for the first time not alone under their own sheets at night. After passing out Jim Morrison’s lyrics so they could follow along with the song, the students’ attitudes toward the discussion of Freud’s Oedipal Complex that followed ranged from tentative to outright rejection. Many of them were quite firm in their insistence that they had no desire to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. I did not try to convince them otherwise, nor did I believe otherwise…not in a strict, literal sense anyway. No need. Years later, most of them would grow up to become fans of Star Wars and Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and be so enthralled by the literal or figurative acts of patricide that drive those narratives that their squeamishness in my classroom would be but a misty prelude.
I’m not a psychoanalyst and my understanding of Freud is no greater than that of your typical liberal arts major. But I love the myths and metaphors Freud provides us with for understanding human nature as much as I love the myths and metaphors that come down from the Bible…or from the Ancient Greeks. And because I put such great stock in viewing human history through our myths and metaphors, I could argue with the Texas State Board of Education that when Jim Morrison sings about killing his father, he’s echoing the human longing…at least the male human longing…to challenge the authority of the father-figure that goes back to Prometheus with the Greeks and Adam in the Bible and extends up to present day Texas and its near-psychotic yearning to secede from the Union…to kill, in a sense, the father-figure that is Uncle Sam.
Not having much of a scientific mind, I can’t really take my Freud straight up, which is why I rely on the blog’s godfather, Norman O. Brown--as much poet as scientist--to interpret the great Sigmund for me. In Life Against Death, Brown wrote:  

The ego to be sure must always mediate between external reality and the id; but the human ego, not strong enough to accept the reality of death, can perform this mediating function only on condition of developing a certain opacity protecting the organism from reality. The way the human organism protects itself from reality of living and dying is, ironically, by initiating a more active form of dying and this more active form of denying is negation. The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child’s body from the mother’s body…this negative posture blossoms into negation of the self (repression) and negation of the environment (aggression). But negation…is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted image of what is officially denied.

In its simplest manifestation, Brown tells us that the child sucking its thumb is the child’s attempt to maintain connection to the mother’s breast…with later substitutions of cigars and lollypops and various body parts. In its most graphic manifestation it is the substitution of money for excrement…a human’s first discovery of buried treasure…an infantile act of job creation. And then there’s the penis…always the penis. Brown calls the manner in which it lords over so much of our symbolism "genital tyranny". This from Brown’s Love’s Body:

Participation is identification with a part, the all-important part, the penis; a part isolated, abstracted, cut off, castrated…Partial participation is to steal (to be) the penis of another; but only partially not really: [quoting Freud] “She turns herself in phantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way…” The penis still belongs to another; even as our super-ego still belongs to Daddy. The super-ego is borrowed strength; or a stolen trophy; a head cut off, a monument erected high in our house. To idealize is to idolize; to make an idol; to translate into a fixed image for contemplation; to turn into stone.

Think of it…that passage can easily serve as a summary of this election’s most heated issues--defunding Planned Parenthood; outlawing transgender bathrooms; castrating...I mean, breaking up big banks; beheadings in the desert. We can discuss this entire erection…sorry for the slip again…I mean, election in Freudian terms. In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that the primary season's most revealing moment was the infamous Trump-Rubio exchange:Trump: Little Marco!Rubio: Trump has small hands.Trump: There’s nothing wrong with my penis…behold my trophy wife…a stunning symbol and constant reminder of my phallic prowess.
It is art and religion that do the heavy lifting in reining in the id by disguising the scary reality of our existence. It is war and politics that tear away the veil. It is the height of unintended comedy that Trump quoted the salacious Al Wilson hit The Snakeduring a campaign stop. The song about a woman who takes in a forlorn snake she finds by the side of the road only to be mortally bitten by him is a thinly-veiled sexual allegory. Trump used it to warn against taking in Syrian refugees, but the story and its key line is really all about the rise of Donald Trump: Oh, shut up, silly woman, said the reptile with a grinYou knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.
And speaking of snakes, Trump’s opponent in the election will be Hillary Clinton, descendent of Eve, first woman to fall victim to the snake’s seductions…and like Eve’s mythic forebear, Pandora, the scapegoat for all the evils that have come to befall humankind from Sodom and Gomorrah to Goldman Sachs. Over at Face the Nation and The Situation Room they will be analyzing this election as a contest between Republican and Democrat, between ultimate outsider and ultimate insider, perhaps even between Male and Female…though it’s unlikely to ever get as explicit as Freud’s most controversial duality…a face-off between Castration Complex and Penis Envy (there will be that protective veil again). Be that as it may, let’s make no mistake about it. This election will be felt by millions--at a subconscious level at least—as the ages old battle between our species id and ego…between our infantile, unrestrained lust for doing and saying whatever feels good at the moment and our adult need to impose a reality check on our most self-destructive impulses for long-term survival. 

This time it's primal. 

#thistimeitsprimal



*If you Google the lyrics today, you see that the last line reads Mother I want to fuck you, but back in the day that was not allowed so on the record Jim Morrison approximates the act with some orgiastic caterwauling which I’ve tried to duplicate here.